Malaysian Ruling Coalition Wins Big Victory

ENLARGE

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is fed cake by his wife Rosamah Mansor, as they celebrate his ruling National Front coalition's win over the opposition led by Anwar Ibrahim, who alleged manipulation of votes.
Getty Images

KUALA LUMPUR—Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak
's
election win victory Sunday will likely enable him to press ahead with a series of ambitious spending plans aimed at accelerating economic growth and helping this resource-rich Southeast Asian nation catch up with some wealthier neighbors.

As results trickled in showing early gains for Mr. Najib's National Front coalition, bands of supporters rode on motorcycles through downtown Kuala Lumpur waving flags and sounding their horns.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's election win paves the way for his party to move forward with a series of ambitious spending plans. The WSJ's James Hookway explains how the prime minister's biggest challenge may be bridging the divide between ethnic-Chinese and ethnic-Malay constituents.

By the early hours of Monday, the Election Commission showed the National Front winning 133 of the country's 222 parliamentary seats, more than enough to form a government, compared with its opponents' 89 seats.

Speaking late in the evening, Mr. Najib told reporters his government will focus on healing the country's political divisions and "move to more moderate and accommodative policies."

Political analysts noted that the country's large ethnic-Chinese minority had largely swung to the opposition, opening up a split between this predominantly Muslim country's prosperous cities and its largely ethnic-Malay-populated rural areas.

Still, some observers said Mr. Najib had secured what looks like a comfortable victory. "They were close to getting a two-thirds majority, and that will mean a stable and secure government," said
James Chin,
a Malaysian political science professor and a visiting fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. "But the ethnic split in the vote shows that there is a danger that country could become more polarized."

Investors cheered the victory, sending the Malaysian stock market up 4.5% at the open to a record high. The market had been stalled all year in anticipation of the elections and the move upward was seen by analysts as a vote for continuing Mr. Najib's fiscal reforms. Malaysia's currency, the ringgit, hit a 21-month high against the dollar and bond prices rose.

The election victory is Mr. Najib's first, giving him his own mandate and positioning him better to push his agenda. He was appointed by his party in 2009 to succeed former leader
Abdullah Badawi.

Malaysians Go to Polls

Voters queue up to cast ballots during the general elections outside a polling station in Pekan on Sunday. Reuters

Opinion polls had suggested the election was poised on a knife-edge. It was portrayed by many people here as a contest to see what kind of country Malaysia should aspire to be.

Mr. Najib, a 59-year-old British-educated aristocrat, urged voters to stick with the National Front that has governed this resource-rich nation of 28 million uninterruptedly since independence from Britain in 1957 and which, under his stewardship, embarked on economic and social overhauls to improve its competitiveness and boost incomes.

A Malaysian Life

View the political journey of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

Opposition leader
Anwar Ibrahim's
People's Alliance, meanwhile, campaigned on speeding up the pace of change, pledging to remove a race-based system of quotas and preferences that has defined this diverse nation for decades and opened up its closely controlled political system.

In the days leading up to the vote, pro-democracy activists raised the stakes further by accusing Mr. Najib's government of attempting to sway the result of the election by flying in tens of thousands of people with questionable voting credentials to cast ballots in marginal seats.

Malaysia's Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections said it appeared that some of the arrivals were from Indonesia, Myanmar, and other countries—a claim Mr. Najib denied. After the election, Mr. Anwar accused the National Front of manipulating the vote, saying he would challenge results in several electoral districts.

Malaysia's election tussle was closely watched around Asia, where other governments are grappling with rising expectations for more freedoms and accountability. Analysts say the election will likely be followed in the Muslim world, where Malaysia is widely regarded as an example of how Islam can potentially coexist with the trappings of modern democracies, and where Mr. Anwar is a well-known figure who has repeatedly said he is fighting his last election.

Mr. Najib held off the oppositions' challenge, partly by borrowing from Mr. Anwar's reformist playbook and, analysts say, by stirring fears about the stability of the opposition leader's alliance—an often fragile coalition of Islamist hard-liners and secular-leaning democrats.

ENLARGE

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim casts his vote as his wife Wan Azizah and a staff member look on in Kubang Semang, Penang.
European Pressphoto Agency

With a fresh majority in Parliament, Mr. Najib is expected to accelerate an ambitious $444 billion plan to upgrade the country's infrastructure by the end of the decade and enable the country to compete more effectively against heavyweights such as South Korea and Taiwan instead of jostling for export orders with middle-income countries such as Thailand or Vietnam.

He may have more support to continue rolling back some affirmative action policies introduced over 30 years ago to give a leg up to the majority ethnic-Malay population—especially as the margin of victory might be enough to protect Mr. Najib from a leadership challenge from within the United Malays National Organization, the main party in the National Front.

Such upheavals have happened before. Mr. Najib replaced former leader Mr. Badawi in 2009 after the opposition broke the National Front's comfortable two-thirds majority in the 2008 polls, turning Malaysia into a genuine two-party system for the first time in its history.

ENLARGE

To re-establish UMNO's dominance, Mr. Najib went about suppressing opposition publications and encouraged a more strict interpretation of Islam in order to outflank the growing appeal here of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, one of Mr. Anwar's opposition allies, before liberalizing the economy and freeing up the political system. Among other things, he allowed more space for political protests and outlawed warrantless arrests.

The allegations of vote fraud, though, if substantiated, could undermine Mr. Najib's credibility, especially among urban voters. For many people he won't be legitimate leader, and that could undermine him," said
Bridget Welsh,
a political-science professor at Singapore Management University and a long-term observer of Malaysian politics.

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